Re: GTK 1.2 Tree Item Signal

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Jonathan Smith <jonsmith dragonstar dhs org> writes: 
> I see....  So you believe in maintaining a bug since other people have
> used it?  Nice.

I am unable to parse this sentence.
 
> > The difference between GtkTree and GtkCTree is that GtkTree is
> > bug-packed and broken, in addition to being deprecated, while GtkCTree
> > is merely deprecated. GtkTree will disappear entirely post-2.0,
> > GtkCTree maybe someday too but much less soon, since it's more widely
> > used and less actively buggy.
> 
> Nice planning.  You'll even make phase-outs inconcsistent.

There are two categories of phased-out widgets in GTK 2, marked
differently in the source code:

#ifdef GTK_ENABLE_BROKEN
GtkTree
#endif

#ifndef GTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED
GtkCTree
#endif

i.e. we have broken widgets, which are past mistakes caused by
insufficient maintainer strictness in the early days of GTK.  The two
broken widgets are GtkTree and GtkText. (GtkText is usable for simple
stuff, but if you try a text editor you'll quickly find that it's
broken.) These have both been replaced in GTK 2 at considerable effort
and expense. Broken widgets are disabled by default, and enabled
explicitly by app developers by defining GTK_ENABLE_BROKEN.
Broken widgets will go away as soon as practical, but in any case 
they exist in GTK 2 which is likely to be the normal GTK version for
at least 2 years.

Then there are deprecated widgets, marked by GTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED. 
These are turned on by default, and will be phased out less
aggressively, because they work, it's just that there are nicer
alternatives for achieving the same effect, or occasionally things are
deprecated simply because no one uses them. To explicitly exclude
deprecated widgets, apps can define GTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED.
You can expect deprecated widgets to exist in the library as long as a
good portion of apps are using them.
 
> Thanks to you, personally, I'm much less inclined to use GTK.

If you are going to flame and be a jerk on the lists, over code and
effort that has in large part been contributed by volunteers on their
own time, then I hope you will leave our community and choose
another. Please feel free to use the toolkit that meets your needs
best.

> Thank you for your assistance and confirmation that it is in fact your
> bug.

We are totally up-front about what the bugs are. See
http://bugzilla.gnome.org. I am also going to tell you exactly what is
broken on this list, whether it's the app or GTK. There is no
marketing bullshit here.

Bugs regularly get fixed, in a priority queue; again, if you don't
agree with the priorities, feel free to attach patches to any bug in
bugzilla, and correct fixes will be applied in the next GTK release.

Anyhow: I've given you my advice. Take it or leave it.

Havoc